


The Fire in Which We Burn

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Light Bondage, Power Dynamics, Prompt Fic, Weird Time Shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-03
Updated: 2012-03-03
Packaged: 2017-11-01 01:05:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/350284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The first watch keeps the correct time. Always. Terezi tried starting out of sync the third time they played this game, but without that one thread of the right beat to cling to, the grating wrongness of the other watches knocked Dave out of the mood long before he could hit trance state." Terezi/Dave, idiosycratic forms of bondage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fire in Which We Burn

**Author's Note:**

> This was a response to [a kinkmeme prompt](http://homesmut.livejournal.com/15023.html?thread=30632879#t30632879), the details of which are at the end of the story.

The first watch keeps the correct time. Always. Terezi tried starting out of sync the third time they played this game, but without that one thread of the right beat to cling to, the grating wrongness of the other watches knocked Dave out of the mood long before he could hit trance state.

The first watch is his anchor, his guide rope to the promise of relief.

Terezi likes to switch up which watches are set to what times, so he never knows what touch or what order to associate with each subtly wrong beat. Today his touchstone is small and light, a tiny quartz and plastic face on a narrow plastic strap that Terezi buckles around his left wrist. The watch mechanism still loses time, subject to entropy like every other physical item, but it's close enough to true that Dave can depend on it for now.

It is also hideous neon pink, like irradiated bubblegum.

"What is this, Barbie's funtime playhouse?" Dave asks as he leans back in the pile of clean laundry and varicolored dragon plushies, his booted feet crossed at the ankles. He's down with getting naked -- not much point to sex if you don't -- but the asteroid lab's metal floors are ball-freezing _cold_. Besides, he likes to have a spare weapon to counter his girl's claws. Ergo boots.

(Shit, Rose's vocabulary is rubbing off on him.)

"Only if Barbie likes cotton candy and coolkids," Terezi says with a terrifying cut-glass grin. "Shut up and show some respect for the law, prisoner. You'll be at my mercy soon enough."

"Yes ma'am, Miz Legislacerator, ma'am," Dave says, and obligingly raises his right leg to let Terezi stuff a pocket watch into his boot.

It's running six and a half seconds slow, losing another second every hour. It would take three days for anyone else to notice the lag, but Dave can feel every crawling millisecond of wrongness. He grits his teeth and concentrates on the pink plastic lifeline around his wrist.

Terezi walks behind the pile where he can't see her, can't tell what she's planning. The uncertainty flickers under his skin, quickens his breath. This is about power, about letting himself go, about letting her in. And it's exciting, it reminds him he's alive, but holy jegus fuck Terezi can draw out tension tight as a garrote, sharp as wire against his neck.

Her bare gray arms reach over his head, left hand clutching a heavy metal band as her right hand grabs his right arm. Dave tucks his thumb into his palm to ease the elasticized links over his hand, and the chilled metal scrapes his forearm as the watch sinks toward his elbow. This one is running twelve seconds fast and one of the quartz crystals is cracked, singing a shrill protest against the smooth flow of electrons and gears. Dave closes his eyes and lets his breath hiss out between his clenched teeth.

This would be easier anywhere other than the Furthest Ring. Time isn't constant here. It trips and stumbles over its own rhythm, tied in knots by the inconsistency of space and the tenuous nature of reality itself, in this place outside universes and game sessions alike -- the writhing, alien geometry of the webwork between worlds. Anywhere else he could drown out false beats simply by listening to Time Itself. But here the heartbeat and backbeat of reality is barely a whisper drowned in the variable pulse of his own blood, so hard to remember and hold without a mechanical crutch to amplify it.

Terezi buckles a wide leather band around his right forearm, just below the knob of his wrist. It's only a half-second off true, which is almost worse than a greater discrepancy. The next watch is metal again, like a delicate woman's bracelet that latches shut with a sharp click and runs ten whole minutes slow, some flaw in its gearing throwing a stutter-stop-jerk into its ticks every two to five minutes. Dave can't find the pattern to its little fits of maidenly hysterics and it drives him grubfucking _nuts_.

"Gog dammit, Terezi, that one already?" he complains. He clings to the Barbie watch, straining his fingers down over his palm, twisting his wrist, trying to touch the one clock face that _isn't lying_. It doesn't work and his forearm starts to sting with the strain of muscle and tendon until he gives up and just presses the inside of his wrist against his thigh, letting the watch tick its whispered song into his skin.

"You have no rights but those I choose to permit you," Terezi says. Her cool, smooth hand comes to rest lightly on his face, claw tips dangerously close to the socket of his left eye. "Look at me, Dave."

Dave shudders, tips his head back, opens his eyes to meet her own blank, red, pupilless gaze -- no shades in the way on either side.

"Yeah? Jonesing for a sniff of candy red already, babe? You should look into a twelve step program. Addiction ain't pretty, not even on you, and hypocrisy never becomes an officer of the law. I should write you up for possession of illegal substances. I mean, look at all this stolen time, just lying around, to say nothing of my delicious eyes and the feast that is--"

"Mouthing off will only hurt you," Terezi says, sliding her hand over his lips. Dave licks her palm, just because, and she scratches him gently with one claw. "Behave, coolkid."

When he nods, she lets go of him and stands, slinks back around to the front of the pile where he can see her in all her naked, alien glory -- skinny girl made of wire and angles, ribs running wrong under her glossy skin, strange ridges at her wrists and ankles, little nest of feelers peeking out between her legs where the guard flaps of her bulge are inching back as she gets off on tying him down with time's own chains. She's beautiful, Dave thinks. Sharp and dangerous and so very, very broken. She needs this as much as he does, and he's the only one who gets to see her laid this bare.

Terezi holds up a novelty slap-bracelet watch in her other hand. Slowly, slowly, way too fucking slowly, she lowers it to his left shin... and _snap_ , it curls around his skin, bringing its shitty cheap clock face too close to ignore how it's four minutes and thirteen seconds fast, and fucking fuck, he recognizes those numbers, she did that on purpose.

The tone-deaf cacophony of wounded time is too maddening to ignore, too loud to grit his teeth and hold onto the pure truth of that one lonely neon-pink watch.

"More. Hurry," Dave says, and Terezi stops playing around, just grabs a whole handful of watches from their toybox and dumps them onto his stomach. Every one of them is wrong in its own unique and horrible way, and the sheer weight of errors starts to overwhelm Dave's ability to track them. She arranges them one by one, fastening them around his arms, tying them to his legs with bits of itchy twine, stuffing them into his boots. She has one on a plastic ring -- that's new, Dave thinks, the observation crawling like a drunken three-legged spider through the whirling, writhing storm of mismatched beats. Terezi shoves it onto his left index finger with an ominous finality. Red wells up from his abused knuckle, and she pauses to lick his hand.

Dave's bones are humming, itching like they want to jump out of his body. Almost there. One more, maybe two, oh fuck _please--_

Terezi lifts the heavy bronze locket from around her neck and slides the leather cord over Dave's own head. The heirloom key-wound watch settles against his breastbone, stuttering its wobbly beat, gears slowing infinitesimally, losing time by nanoseconds as the spring uncoils to nothing.

Tick tick t-tick tick t-t-tick tick t-tick tick tick tick tick t-t-tick...

Time

breaks.

A billion billion moments fly apart and shatter into foam on a sea of pure, white, meaningless sensation that pervades the whole of eternity. All the myriad mismatched clocks cancel each other to nothing and take the tether of Time Itself along for the ride. The chain that binds him to _here_ and _now_ dissolves.

Distantly, Dave feels his fingers uncurl from their nail-gouging attempt to dig the mismatched beats out of his blood and bones. He feels his head loll back and his eyes slip closed. He feels Terezi kneel between his legs, one of her plush dragons squeaking under her weight. Her hands settle on his torso, her skin cool and smooth and ever-so-slightly hard, like the texture of a beetle's outer wings.

"Will you do whatever I want, prisoner?" she whispers, her pointed tongue darting out to lick the rim of his right ear. "Will you scream for me when I pull you to the edge again and again, until I finally let the noose snap tight? Will you kiss me when I make you bleed?"

Dave manages to open one eye and roll it in her general direction. Her knives-and-razors grin widens and her claws prick delicately at the skin over his hipbones. The butterfly kiss of pain blurs into the bliss of atemporality, and Dave lets go of his last pretense at control.

"Fuck yes more Terezi please now yes fuck _touch me_ ," he says, jamming in as many words as he can before he loses them in the high of trance and sex.

"So pitiful, Dave," Terezi says. "So helpless. And only I can see you stripped so bare." She licks a sticky path across his face, over his closed eyelids, and she scrapes a claw over the tip of his dick and

he

is

gone.

As his mind flies off in pursuit of vanished Time, Dave swears he can hear Terezi's heart match beats with his own.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Prompt details:** _Any/Dave, bondage._
> 
> _With Dave being the Knight of Time he is acutely aware of the passage of time down to the millisecond. He finds out of sync time-keeping devices to be irritating in general which is why he's always playing music, but he discovers one day that wearing several wristwatches at once will either:_
> 
> _A) cause an almost trance-like state as a result of the dissonance between all the different times. And he likes it but it's even better with sex. --OR-- B) cause an extreme lethargic state (I'm thinking maybe like superman and kryptonite) where he is essentially at the mercy of his partner where they're using time to tie him up instead of rope or handcuffs._
> 
> _No non-con please._


End file.
